Airplane was invented almost one hundred years ago. (1903, by the Wright brothers) In the beginning, their size, speed, altitude, range and payload capabilities were all very limited. As years went by, airplanes became much more powerful and air travel became a big business. Fleets of airplanes carrying passengers and cargo became an industry called "commercial airlines".
Today's big commercial airlines, such as United Airlines or American Airlines, have huge fleets of planes flying from all over the world to all over the world. And their Jumbo jets can carry hundreds of passengers or tons of cargo and reach its destinations within hours.
Meanwhile, the long-distance telecommunication industry also became a major player for linking up people. The travel business and the telecommunication business can not be separated since once the passenger reaches their destination, they will call their friends, family members or business associates or vice versa. Of course, not just travelers have the telecommunication needs.
Currently, transoceanic communication technologies rely heavily on either underwater submarine fiber optics cables or communication satellites. Both system are extremely expensive and have their drawbacks.
The fiber optics cable is good for land-line based technology (versus wireless system), it is extremely expensive to install (even on land) but cheap for its bandwidth(after installed). It takes years to plan and deploy the system but the system can carry heavy loads of broad band data. The fiber optics system, just like any of the wired systems has its major drawback in that it is very expensive to cross water; i.e. ocean sea or lake. Also, it is not economical to install underwater fiber in the less populated regions since the investment is huge and the system has tremendous bandwidth but may lack customers or applications to pay for it.
The other dying industry is communication satellites that are dedicated for serving real-time data. Communication satellites are also extremely expensive, with its weak signals, limited bandwidth, short life expectancy, bad propagation delay and vulnerable to the hostile space environment. The communication satellite is a wireless systems has the advantage that it can be quickly deployed into the orbit in space for quicker services than the fiber optics cable systems.
Using microwave relay station to linkup from point to point was common in the 60's. The mountain top repeaters operated as "line-of-sight" bridges. The wireless signals hopped from repeater to next repeater until it reached its destination. However, the microwave relay station also has its major drawbacks in that it is not feasible to install the repeaters on the water (across ocean) and their bandwidth is limited compare to the fiber optics cables so these microwave relay stations are also becoming obsolete.
Accordingly, there are big demands for an alternative new long-distance telecommunication infrastructure that is low cost, the infrastructure that already exists (for other applications), equipment can be easily installed, easily maintained telecommunication system and capable of broad band data. The present invention is directed to providing such a new telecommunication system.